AWS Amazon Web Services

Servers on the internet are under constant attack, usually from automated scripts trying to make use of your resources. WordPress installations are doubly attacked, because they’re often out of date and are relatively easy to take over. This article describes how to use fail2ban and Cloudflare to protect your Amazon…

OpenSSH certificates are used to authenticate you against your server, so you can log in to administer your server. It’s a good idea to rotate OpenSSH certificates occasionally, in case they’ve someone been released or compromised. This isn’t something AWS can do for you, so you have to do it manually.…

I’m happy to announce that this week I qualified as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Level. This is significant qualification that validates that my knowledge and skills with the AWS platform meet their high professional standards. I offer independent AWS Consulting Services (prices here). Please contact us if we can help with your project.

I run all my websites on a tiny Amazon EC2 t2.nano instance, which has 512MB of RAM. This runs Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Monit, and other bits and pieces. The instance is easily powerful enough for most tasks, especially given I use a the CloudFlare Content Distribution Network (CDN). The instance…

Moving WordPress Between AWS Regions – EC2 and RDS In previous articles, I’ve described how to set up WordPress in AWS using EC2 and RDS. In this article I’ll describe the steps I took to move the server between regions and get it working again – in my case from…

Backing Up EC2 To Dropbox Introduction In this tutorial we’ll be setting up a backup databases from EC2 to Dropbox. You can use it to backup anything you like – logs, your entire webroot, anything really. AWS is reliable, but an offsite backup is best practice – AWS doesn’t make this easy.…

Today I wanted to sftp into the webroot for my server (/var/www) but because of the way the permissions are set up the default ec2-user doesn’t have permission to do this. That directory tree is owned by the user “fred”, which otherwise doesn’t get used. I decided to allow ssh…

I recently migrated a number of WordPress websites and a custom PHP website from AWS RDS to MySQL on an EC2 instance using the AWS Database Migration Service. I didn’t know beforehand that secondary indexes, foreign keys, and auto_increment fields aren’t migrated – this made a heck of a mess,…

Introduction A year ago I moved all my websites to AWS using the free tier, using an EC2 t2.micro and the RDS relational database service. Now that my year of free tier is up I’d like to reduce my costs. I want to migrate from RDS to MySQL on EC2.…